Zhaklin Dobreva speaks with director Stoyan Radev about ‘Cries from the Underground’ – Yordan Rаsin’s one-man performance based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s celebrated novella ‘Notes from the Underground’, presented as part of the Showcase programme.

In Cries from the Underground, you return once again to the monologic form. What attracts you to it as a theatrical language – the possibility of psychological depth, a direct confrontation with the audience, or a particular form of theatrical confession?

Freud says that all the figures in a dream are projections of the dreamer himself, and later he draws an analogy with the literary work as well — all characters originate from the author; he sees himself reflected in each of them. In the one-man performance, this idea comes alive before the audience: in a single person, everyone discovers themselves and the full diversity of life. This form gives me the possibility of maximum concentration and synthesis of theatrical means, in which their common root and meaning are revealed – through the actor and his performance, through transformation and direct communication with the audience, one can arrive at a shared revelation.

Notes from Underground is a work in which thought is tense, contradictory, and often self-destructive. How did you transform this highly reflective material into theatrical action, and what prompted the change of title to Cries from the Underground?

Dostoevsky’s character himself repeatedly says that he dreams of speaking to all of humanity. That is the key to the performance. What matters is not simply what the Underground Man says, but the fact that he says it before an audience. The event is the act of speaking itself. And since the thoughts being expressed are disturbingly honest, they can only be cried out – the effort, and the exaltation born of that effort, give rise to the cries. That is where the title of the performance comes from. Nietzsche says that in Notes from Underground, truth screams, because only in this way can it reveal itself – not as philosophical reasoning, but as a spontaneous cry of life.

The figure of the “Underground Man” carries within him doubt, alienation, wounded pride, and a painful inability to find his place in the world. How do you read him today? Where does he meet the contemporary person?

The encounter between the “Underground Man” and the contemporary person is an encounter with the self – one that contemporary man tries to avoid, because he does not want to spoil his good mood. And the good mood of contemporary man is a delusion connected to the image he has of himself. Many cultural acquisitions contribute to the construction of the illusory, idealised image with which contemporary man identifies. All the knowledge accumulated up to the present day is used for moral liberation, reassurance, and comfort. That is why fake news, post-truth, and cognitive dissonance are phenomena so frequently discussed in our time. Everyone is subject to their influence, and everyone seeks a comfortable solution. But this only deepens the problems. The “Underground Man” restores the discomfort of an uncompromising conscience and self-accusation as the only true cure.

You chose Yordan Rаsin for a one-man performance in which the actor has to bear the full weight of Dostoevsky’s text – its intellectual density, contradictions, and painful confessional nature. How did you work with him so that he could discover his own “Underground Man”?

Working with Yordan Răsin is very easy, because he combines human modesty, honesty, innocence, and trustfulness with deep insight, great inner scale, enormous expressive power, and organic acting talent. The point is for the text to be sufficiently provocative, and for the director to keep moving the target further away and loading new bullets, so that the full potential I have just mentioned can unfold in the performance.

Your productions such as Oh My God, Angel’s Cry, Karakondzhul, and now Cries from the Underground reveal an interest in the human being in an extreme situation – alone with oneself, with guilt, fear, faith, or the absence of meaning. Do you recognise a common line in these works within your path as a director?

For me, these are the questions art is called upon to address. These questions give rise to it; art is their answer – not as a final statement, but as a gesture of recognition, of compassion that becomes intuitive understanding. I am deeply grateful that I can be part of theatre, which shelters life in all its nuances and celebrates it again and again on stage.

For another year, your productions are part of the programme of the Varna Summer International Theatre Festival. What does this encounter with the festival audience mean to you – is the conversation with spectators different in the context of such a forum?

The Varna Summer Festival is an outstretched hand – both to artists and to the audience. It is like those days in the calendar when, by taking part in a traditional ritual, you step out of the everyday routine and look at the flow of life in a bright, meaningful way, surrounded by friends and like-minded people.